Andrew’s Brain is the newest novel from American master E. L. Doctorow. The author of Ragtime, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, and The March takes us on a radical trip into the life and mind of a man—his marriages, mistakes, dreams—as he thinks about how to make sense of his life, and times.
Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, he is unfurling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to a mysterious act. As Andrew confesses, peeling back the layers of his story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, about each other and ourselves. Written with great psychological depth and lyrical precision, this is a bold and profound new novel, a surprising achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the word of Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.”
Recent Honors: In 2013, Doctorow received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. He also received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Lots of early praise for Andrew’s Brain:
“Writing in concert with Twain, Poe, and Kafka, Doctorow distills his disturbing, morally complex, tragic, yet darkly funny novel of the collective American unconscious and human nature in all its perplexing contrariness. Word will travel quickly about this intense and provocative novel by best-selling literary giant Doctorow.” —Booklist, starred review
“Through this dialectic narrative, Doctorow connects to the common theme seen throughout his work: one’s history is often a battle between memory and self-struggle to maintain an image of morality and adequacy. Doctorow deftly captures the complex but beautiful vagaries of life in clean, simple language. —Library Journal, starred review
“A writer of dazzling gifts and boundless imaginative energy.”—Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker
“One of our greatest living writers . . . a virtuosic storyteller with enormous range.”—People
“Doctorow is a magician. . . . His prose is dazzling.”—Vogue